New Yorkers Without a Voice: A Tragedy of Urban Renewal

When the author, a thirty-five-year-old Lutheran minister, became pastor of Manhattan's Trinity Lutheran Church in 1961, he found himself in the middle of a political row involving New York City's redevelopment officials and tenement dwellers in and near an East River housing site marked for demolition. Set forth here are the details of that uneven struggle, and the dismaying lesson it holds for the poor in urban renewal conflicts. This article is adapted from Mr. Simon's book, FACES OF POVERTY.

In 1940 about 15,000 people lived in those blocks. Most of them were poor. In
1943, under a new state law and by contract with the city, Metropolitan Life
Insurance Company agreed to buy the land from the city at a drastically
depreciated price. The city was willing to bear the loss on this in return for
anticipated gains in property taxes later on. The bulldozers moved in, and
thousands of families were evacuated. Hardly any of them were rehoused in the
new buildings that were completed between 1947 and 1949.

Metropolitan Life made Stuyvesant Town middle class and white, reflecting a
strong impulse to create a suburban community in Manhattan, a non-city city. In
keeping with the mood of the 1940s, it openly discriminated against Negroes
until pressure from the city council led Metropolitan Life to admit three Negro
Families in 1950. An ordinance passed by the city council the following year
made discrimination in such projects illegal. However, according to the 1960
census—a decade after Stuyvesant Town agreed to integrate—only 47 persons
from a total population of 22,405 were Negroes, barely two tenths of one
percent. If one includes the 16 Puerto Ricans, that would raise the integration
percentage to almost three tenths of one percent, three Negroes and Puerto
Ricans out of every thousand residents!

Several things happened with the creation of Stuyvesant Town. First, thousands
of people, most of them poor, had to move off the property. The cancer of slums
spread elsewhere. Second, the new housing units were not only economically
stratified but racially restrictive as well. Even more is at stake, however,
for injustice has a way of reaching out in all directions. Consider the matter
of education.

Since the latter part of 1963, when long overdue pressure for quality and
integrated schools in New York suggested the possibility of exchanging more
children in both directions across Fourteenth Street, a furor was created by
parents in Stuyvesant Town and elsewhere above Fourteenth Street. In public
meetings many residents spoke self-righteously of conditions below Fourteenth
Street, defending indignantly the sanctity of the neighborhood school. If a
project like Stuyvesant Town systematically excludes people, and if the
residents of that project exclude themselves from responsibility toward the
misery of neighbors whose community they have invaded, is it fair to blame the
excluded ones for conditions that are characteristic of crowded ghettos? Or to
be surprised that Negroes and Puerto Ricans and others are desperate for a
break in this ugly pattern? One may ask also what price Stuyvesant Town
residents ultimately pay in moral currency for living in a middle-class ghetto.
What we see happening in Stuyvesant Town is precisely the same flight from
reality represented by most suburban communities.

Unlike the area below Fourteenth Street, Stuyvesant Town is to be reckoned with
politically. In terms of financial resources, organization, and ability to
articulate their desires, residents of Stuyvesant Town carry a
disproportionately strong voice in the decision-making process, as effective
blocking of any school pairing demonstrated.

On the eastern edge of Precinct Nine is a large strip of low-income public
housing (Jacob Riis and Lillian Wald projects) with a population total of
approximately 15,000. This figure includes about an equal number of Negro,
Puerto Rican, and Caucasian tenants. Rents range from $11 to $18 a room per
month in these two projects, with the rent based on income, number of
dependents in a family, and other factors. The Jacob Riis and Lillian Wald
projects in some respects also represent a form of discrimination against the
poor, although such projects were obviously conceived and are operated for the
benefit of low-income families.

For many, public housing represents their only live option for decent housing,
and critics of public housing should not forget that. At the present time there
is a backlog of 120,000 applicants for public housing in the city of New York.
Only 10 percent of the applicants make it in any given year. Some do not apply
because they cannot afford even the lowest rents in public housing, and some
cannot qualify because of such factors as illegitimate children or incidence of
crime in the family.

In some respects public housing is sick. It is sick primarily because it dumps
low-income families into one economically (and often racially) segregated pile.
There is nothing intrinsically bad about poor people living together. It is
bad, however, when they are systematically excluded from living with others,
and when 15,000 people are legally penalized by constantly draining off their
most economically successful families and their leadership. This happens
because to qualify for public housing, one must not earn more than a specified
income (depending upon family size, and so forth). Thus the most stable and
helpful members of such developments—precisely those who are best situated to
help it achieve some sense of community—are continually being evicted.

The most obvious result of this situation in public housing is that the slums
tend to invade these projects. Tenants have to take the onus with the bonus,
for such projects become stigmatized, and residents are often made to feel not
quite human for living there. Demoralization sets in.

There is a less obvious result of public housing's policy of evicting
leadership. Politically the poor are robbed of some of their strongest
spokesmen and best organizers. When they leave, these aspiring and successful
residents in public housing cannot be expected to retain their sympathy for the
suffering they once knew; and even if they do, they are usually too far away to
do much about it. One outcome of this is that the poor, kept in isolation and
with only a whisper of a political voice, can easily be bypassed when public
policy is made.

Isolated in ghettos of poverty, abandoned by yesterday's poor who now live
separate lives in new middle-class ghettos, the very poor find themselves
outside the mainstream of concern. Like Samson, they have been shorn of their
strength and left to tread the mill.